• Lebanon
  • September 12, 2006
  • 2 minutes read

IOF officer admits: We dropped 1.2 million cluster bombs on Lebanon

An IOF commander has admitted that his army’s air force had dropped around 1.2 million internationally-banned cluster bombs on Lebanon other than using the phosphoric bombs, which are also internationally-banned.


Hebrew daily ’Ha’aretz’ on Tuesday quoted the commander of the IOF rocket unit as saying, “The IOF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets”.


In addition, soldiers in IOF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war,” the paper said, adding, “According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war”.


The paper further said that the cluster rounds which don’t detonate on impact, believed by the United Nations to be around 40% of those fired by the IOF in Lebanon, remain on the ground as unexploded munitions, effectively littering the landscape with thousands of land mines which will continue to claim victims long after the war has ended.


“Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war”, it added.


According to the commander, in order to compensate for the inaccuracy of the rockets and the inability to strike individual targets precisely, units would “flood” the battlefield with munitions, accounting for the littered and explosive landscape of post-war Lebanon.


Meanwhile, another IOF colonel was quoted by ’Ma’ariv’ newspaper published on Tuesday as saying that what the IOF air force had done in Lebanon was similar to that of the Nazi army’s air force’s devastation of a Spanish city during the civil war in that country.